Our Zoning is Fundamentally Flawed

By Charles Houston

Time to nerd out a bit.

At the end of this piece there’s a two or three-line, italicized bio. Yes, I was a developer and yes, I handled millions of square feet of major office buildings, from Miami to Louisville, and from New Orleans to Richmond. My biggest building was 1.2 million square feet, the tallest was 40 floors. Each of them was for a Fortune 50 firm. Doing that meant working with planning and zoning staffs on every project, and often digging deeply into many zoning codes.

Now, years later, I’ve finally understood a fundamental flaw in almost every zoning ordinance I’ve read. Including ours.

The Law vs. The Map

Zoning has two components – a code or ordinance, and a zoning map. In practice, public debate has always seemed to be about the ordinance or about making a one-parcel change in the zoning map. Preparing the zoning map is generally done by planning and zoning bureaucrats. 

Perhaps elsewhere there are public hearings and comments about a zoning map, but I don’t think that happens in Loudoun. So, what does happen? Here’s my educated guess:

County Staff looks at a map of the county, finds swaths of land that seem to share common characteristics, and anoints them with the same zoning classification. Thus, almost all of western Loudoun’s 230,000 acres are labeled ARN for the northern part or ARS for the southern part. (“AR” means “Agricultural Rural” and N is for the northern part of the county while S is for the southern area.) Aside from different allowable densities, these two areas have essentially the same zoning.

Then what?

Down to the Last Decimal Point

With scalpel-like precision, the recent “General Plan” for the county projects 11,643 new houses in western Loudoun by 2040. Wow! This number should be updated to reflect development and conservation easements done since the plan was adopted in 2019. I’d hazard a wild guess that around 9,500 houses remain to be built. That’s waaay too many, but I’ll save that topic for a later day. We usually forget that the 11,643 Staff estimate is only through 2040. Who knows how many houses could be built after that year?

Staff used a numbingly detailed approach. They examined every parcel of land in the west, then lot-by-lot, deducted land that was already developed or was in easement, and then divided the remaining (undeveloped) lots into two categories: Parcels over 20 acres in the north or over 40 acres in the south, and then, smaller parcels.

Next, they applied the maximum allowed density for each parcel. Thus, an undeveloped 100-acre farm in the north would be assigned 20 houses, every undeveloped plot less than 20 acres would be assigned one house. Applying simple arithmetic to Staff’s lot-by-lot assumptions yielded the projected 11,643 houses. 

Many conservationists correctly ignored the five-digit precision and simply shouted, “Too much!” Some even asked, “Why did you assume the maximum density? Others should have asked, “What did you assume about future conservation easements?”

Good observations and questions, but two more important things were missing in the General Plan. 

Football With No Goal Line

First, the Plan does a poor job of answering the “then what?” question: What’s the fiscal impact? What additions to infrastructure will be necessary to accommodate those new houses and 100,000 more vehicle trips each day? The Plan just tosses out a stunning number new houses, then stops.

Second and more important, the Plan never opines whether seeing that many more houses is a good thing or something unacceptable. It never describes what western Loudoun would look like with that many more houses. There was no vision. Repeat, there was no vision. 

Staff would disagree and laud their plan. I won’t – it’s full of grand aspirations but few details. It’s also full of contradictions. How about this: “Residential development should conserve land for … the rural economy…” Or this: “to protect and preserve this valuable land to sustain the rural economy.” Those statements are diametrically the opposite of what western residents want. Putting businesses over citizens is ludicrous, but Loudoun’s done exactly that over the years, going as far back as a 1980’s Board that was so controversial that the FBI had to investigate.

Moreover, what exactly is meant by “rural economy”? Does it conjure farms, nurseries, artisan meats and cheeses, flowers? Instead, the rural economy and helpful zoning provisions generally support the brewery industry, whose roadside bars make Loudoun a great drink-and-drive location.

Mainly, we wanted to be left alone. That would be a clear goal line.

They Forgot the Key Vision

The planning effort should have begun with agreeing upon population targets, for the county as a whole and then allocated between planning areas. When the Plan was written there were around 415,000 residents in the county. The Plan used growth rates and estimated that we’ll have 695,000 people by 2040. That would be truly horrible.

Instead, I would have suggested a build-out population target of 500,000 people and adjusted zoning to meet that target. It would have been so easy: just use simple arithmetic. My suggestion posits 195,000 fewer people than did the plan, so divide the Plan’s 695,000 number into 195,000. 

Presto! In every zoning category, just reduce allowable residential density by 28% and we’re set.

A Ratchet

Media pundits and politicians constantly wonder why citizens are unhappy with the economy. Afterall, inflation rates and unemployment have dropped, so why aren’t we happy? Compared to a few years ago, consumer prices are still sky high, and worse, they ain’t coming down as much as they went up. In economic terms, that’s the ratchet effect at work. That’s a huge problem which the pols and pundits just don’t understand.  

The ratchet effect also applies to our population growth. Many thousands have moved here in the past few decades, and I doubt if they are planning on going back. This does not mean that we have to accept ad infinitum growth at unsustainable rates. Through better, citizen-oriented zoning, we can limit the ultimate population to a number we can accept.

Charles Houston lives on a small horse farm outside Paeonian Springs and used to develop large office buildings for big corporations.